Green Transition, Extractive Continuities: Lithium Mining and the Environmental Contradictions of Sustainability

ABSTRACT Global decarbonization has positioned lithium as a strategic mineral for electric vehicles, battery storage, and low‐carbon development. Yet its extraction raises serious environmental, political, and justice concerns that complicate dominant narratives of clean energy progress. This article presents a critical integrative review of peer‐reviewed scholarship published from 2015 onward on lithium mining, green extractivism, and the environmental contradictions of sustainability. From an initial search of 1127 papers, 68 studies were retained for thematic synthesis. The review develops a critical transition‐materiality framework linking four dimensions: material demand, ecological burden, territorial justice, and governance legitimation. The findings show that lithium extraction is associated with water stress, land disturbance, biodiversity risk, Indigenous rights concerns, community conflict, and uneven geographies of sacrifice. They also show how sustainability discourse, critical mineral policy, and responsible sourcing frameworks can legitimize extraction while leaving deeper questions of demand, consent, and ecological limits unresolved. The article argues that a just green transition requires more than technological substitution; it demands material sufficiency and democratic governance.